Russi Taylor

You never see her. What you hear is a pitch most adults cannot reach without strain, held for a whole scene and then a whole career: Minnie Mouse's giggle, Martin Prince's piping certainty, a baby crying on The Mary Tyler Moore Show in the mid-1970s. Russi Taylor spent four decades in the top octave of the human voice and made it sound like somewhere a person could live.

The turn came in 1986. Minnie had gone largely unvoiced for decades, and Disney held an audition that drew more than 200 hopefuls. Taylor went in having listened to the earlier Minnies and tried to find a blend of them, and when they asked her to improvise she gave them Juliet on the balcony. She kept the part for thirty-three years, through Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Mickey, Donald, Goofy: The Three Musketeers (2004), the shorts, the series and the parks, until her death in 2019. Alongside it, from 1987, she was Huey, Dewey, Louie and Webby in DuckTales, and from 1989 she was Martin Prince, Sherri and Terri and Üter on The Simpsons, across nearly 200 episodes and the 2007 film.

That second list is the one that tells you what she could do. Minnie is a job of maintenance, keeping a voice people have known since childhood exactly where they left it, and she did it in the company of Bill Farmer, Tony Anselmo and Tress MacNeille for so long that the ensemble became a fixed thing. The Springfield children are a job of invention. Martin Prince is a boy and Sherri and Terri are girls, and you would not guess the three of them share a throat: the twins flat and conspiratorial, Martin bright and eager and certain he is loved. We have laughed at Martin more than we are proud of, and the reason is that Taylor never lets him hear the joke; the voice is pure delight at being asked a question, and the cruelty is all ours.

The limit was the one you would guess. A high, girlish timbre fits some kinds of character and not others, and she was rarely asked to play a grown woman, which is probably why nobody found out whether she could. In Babe (1995), the one film of hers we have written about and rated highly, she is the scheming house cat, Duchess, and our review did not mention her. We mean that as a compliment of sorts: a voice in an animal picture that draws attention to itself has done the wrong job, and the cat is the one creature in that farmhouse who should sound as if she is keeping her thoughts to herself.

"I never wanted to be famous," she said in 2017. "The characters I do are famous, and that's fine for me." It is a sensible arrangement. The mouse will go on without her, and some child will learn the laugh and not know whose it was, which is the only kind of permanence a voice actor ever gets.